A Taste of DesignCon

I didn't go to DesignCon, but Gabe did, so let's sample his DesignCon Morsels.

What's nice is the variety of topics he touches on:

• The lack of interest in ESL vs. design implementation, and why engineers are being short-sighted by not getting into architecture.
• Thermal performance, an interdisciplinary problem. When I've been involved in thermal analysis, the biggest problem is coming up with a credible power consumption figure. It's back to the "vectors" problem, and what's a representative (or worst-case) simulation?
• Is DFM for Designers?
• Fewer students are going into Engineering. And engineers "get no respect", as Rodney Dangerfield would say.

Thanks Gabe, for the synopsis!

Dr. Thomas W. Williams to Receive EDAA Lifetime Achievement Award

Saw this over at DFT Digest: Synopsys Fellow Dr. Thomas W. Williams to Receive EDAA Lifetime Achievement Award

Look at all Dr. Williams' achievements, stretching back to the 1970s. This is (one of) the father of LSSD, which begat the full scan DFT methodology that we all use today. He's truly a giant in DFT one of the legendary early figures in EDA.

Congratulations on a well-deserved honor!

Chips Grab Mainstream Headlines

I was surprised and excited to see a chip-process development featured on the front page, above the fold, in the San Jose Mercury News. This is "the newspaper of silicon valley", as they say. The headline gushed Chip advance biggest in 40 years.

It's about successes announced by Intel and IBM to fabricate metal-gate transistors with "high-K" dielectric. This is good news, which hopefully will enable us to continue to follow Moore's Law.

But it doesn't hit me that this is the biggest development in 40 years. Is this triumph over materials significantly different from figuring out how to to use Copper interconnect, or "low-K" interconnect isolation? Those were both hard manufacturing problems that the process wizards solved in the last decade. Maybe it was a slow news day. ;-)

Is Texas Instruments Exiting the Semiconductor Technology Rat Race?

SeekingAlpha is a financial web site that I just discovered. It's unique in that it focuses on analysis rather than news. And I've started following semiconductor company analyses, such as Is Texas Instruments Exiting the Semiconductor Technology Rat Race?

Technologists live for working on leading edge technology. TI killing off 32nm development is a major change in how it views itself and whether it will be able to attract the best and the brightest scientists in the future -- not to mention how the ones who do this there today must feel.

Now that is significant! Another IDM "throws in the towel" on doing all their own process and fab development. Will we be catching our breath at 45nm for awhile?

Yahoo! EDA!

Does Yahoo! understand the EDA industry? I have the headlines from their EDA News News Archive - Yahoo! Finance in "My Yahoo!". But most of the time, even a very liberal definition of "EDA" doesn't explain why these articles are here. I can understand including foundries, IP vendors, and even programmable logic companies. But how to understand the inclusion of U.S. Department Of Commerce Makes Annual Adjustments to Seasonal Factors for ISM Manufacturing PMI and Diffusion Indexes and ISM Non-Manufacturing Diffusion Indexes or Roche Diagnostics and Protedyne Sign Global Agreement?

I thought these industry news groupings have a human editor, but it makes you wonder ...

Intel Builds 80-Core Chip

This Intel 80-Core Chip is pretty far off in Research-land, but it does pose intriguing concepts, such as

• Better performance/power ratio
• Finer granularity of compute power and power consumption. If you need more performance, it wakes up more cores, and when you're done, they go back to sleep.
• "Core hopping". If one part of the chip gets hot, the work that those particular cores are doing is moved to other cores on another part of the chip.
• On-chip communications network. Of course, all multi-core chips have some sort of network. I'd like to see how sophisticated the Intel one is.

Prof. Richard Newton's Influence on the EDA Industry

Lamentation & Loss is a enlightening eulogy for Professor Richard Newton. By interviewing several EDA industry legends, Peggy Aycinena succeeds in recognizing Prof. Newton's profound impact on EDA, and reveals interesting history about Cadence and Synopsys, among others.

Hewlett-Packard's FPGA research, and replacing transistors

You may have seen the story earlier this week about a "breakthrough" announced by HP researchers, which involved applying nano technology to semiconductors.

I was intrigued, and Googled around to find this analysis at the "ars technica" web site: Hewlett-Packard's FPGA research, and replacing transistors. This excellent article explains that the HP announcement is for a very specific (and limited) application: FPGA interconnect. And it points out that the more promising HP announcement actually came out in 2005, which pointed to use of nanotechnology for circuit switching, not just interconnection.

Gotta love this web site's tag line: Serving the PC enthusiast for over 6x10^-2 centuries!

Best Companies to Work For ASIC & EDA?

In the news today is the much-talked-about list of 100 Best Companies to Work For 2007 in Fortune magazine.

Hmmm, the companies that we typically work at didn't fare too well. I only see a couple that would typically have ASIC or EDA engineers:

11

Cisco Systems

14

Qualcomm

87

Texas Instruments

As far as high-tech, there are a lot more software companies listed, and many related to health care.

It would great if EE Times did an industry-specific version -- Best Places for an EE to Work For!

DAAMIT vs. ChipZilla, Past, Present and Future

I've mentioned this tech enthusiast web site before. Geek.com Geek News - Is AMD's vision enough? is a great summary of the multi-core strategies being pursued by AMD and Intel. Be sure to check out the User Comments, which are one of the best resources of this site. "GoatGuy" is the real deal, always good for expert commentary. And this lexington_steele guy is pretty provocative, too. I wonder where he got that name?

R.I.P. Dean Newton

The EDA industry and the University of California lost an influential leader with the passing of the College of Engineering Dean, Richard Newton: EDA icon Richard Newton dies.

I was fortunate to hear Dean Newton speak at a "Berkeley in Silicon Valley" lecture last April. My notes from that lecture note that "synthetic biology", the application of engineering to living organisms (on a nano scale), was one of Dr. Newton's current passions, and his family requested donations in his name to the Berkeley Center for Synthetic Biology.

Update: John Cooley's Memories of Professor Richard Newton.

Happy New Year in ASIC & EDA

I thought about writing a forward-looking article, making some predictions about our industry. But, so far, I am too lazy. ;-) Besides, that's what Gabe & Gary get paid the big bucks to do. So, here are links to their New Year columns with a bit of color from me.

• Gabe's column, Last minute deals open opportunities for 2007 and beyond, is focused and sounds plausible. His DFM story sounds good -- it needs to get more into the design phase, as a proactive guide to help people laying out the circuits. And I like his call for "Locality Sensitive Cells" that would be DFM-correct by construction. His other point, about Mentor's moves in the ESL and C-synthesis space, discusses alternatives to SystemC, and where C may be lacking as the perfect system-level language.
• Gary's "column" isn't really written by Gary. He has Richard Goering as his ghost writer! I have more problems with Gary's predictions that Gabe's. Gary is still predicting the ascendancy of ESL, FPGA, and embedded software. I still see plenty of challenge and opportunity in plain old RTL-based standard cell design! Gary does have 10 predictions, and it's worth looking over the rest of them for thought-provoking variety.

Get a (better) job

I've been reading Ask The Headhunter for years, since Nick Corcodilos wrote a column in EE Times. It's always provocative, and worth a read if you may be looking to get hired or do some hiring in the future. (And who isn't?)

Poke around his web site to get a feel for what he writes about. It's a good reference. And, sign up for his newsletter to get his periodic thought-provoking missives. Happy Holidays!

EDA is Child's Play

One of the more common parts of my job is to figure out why something stopped working, or why it is suddenly producing different (namely worse) results than before, when "nothing's changed". Things like

• Why is the synthesis tool crashing now when it ran fine before?
• What changed so that I'm not making area/timing any more?
• Why is equivalence checking failing now?

For all of these sorts of things, I end up comparing logs, netlists, scripts, etc. I am the tkdiff master! With my eagle eye and understanding of the personalities of EDA tools and companies, it's a sleuthing challenge to find the culprit.

If I tried to explain this to a layman, I'd have to say that part of my job is playing the grown-up version of one of my daughter's favorite games, Spot the Difference. Yes, that's what I went to all those years of college for. :-)

The New Way of Graphics, and More

NVIDIA launched their new graphics chip architecture, the chip code-named G80. Check out these reviews of how the performance blows away yesterday's best graphics.

• Bjorn3D's review
• Guru3D GeForce 8800 GTS & GTX review
• Tom's Hardware GeForce 8800: Here Comes the DX10 Boom

This page has the G80 Hardware Specs. How about 681 million transistors?

The architecture is very interesting and different from past GPUs designed by NVIDIA or ATI (AMD). Rather than dedicated compute engines for different stages of the "graphics pipeline", this new architecture has scores of 1.35 GHz streaming processors that can be assigned to the most demanding graphics tasks for a particular game or scene. Because of this generality, it can be applied to completely new problems, as described in ExtremeTech's article:

As you might imagine, this will be aimed at highly parallelizable compute tasks, such as scientific computing, financial analysis and oil exploration. Nvidia will actually be offering a C compiler to facilitate thread computing, so programmers interested in general-purpose programming with the GPU don't have to be locked into Direct3D semantics. -- GeForce 8800 GTX: 3D Architecture Overview

The Longest Quick Reference Ever

This week I wanted to run an EDA tool that I don't run every day. I needed to look up a command line option, and found that, inexplicably, the option wasn't listed by the program's help option.

So, I trudged over to the online documentation and was happy to find the Tool X Quick Reference manual. I figured it'd be a couple of pages long and I'd print it out and keep it next to my computer.

Well I was shocked (shocked, I tell you!) to find that the "Quick" Reference manual is 86 pages long. Something is seriously wrong with your product or your tech pubs when this happens.

What do you think? Are you surprised that a tool could be so inscrutable? Is it just that the writers don't understand what Quick Reference means? And, can you guess which tool I'm referring to? (I'll post the answer later.)

Just how unsexy is EDA?

April Fools in October? I thought I must be reading a joke: in Life without Dataquest, Gabe Moretti reports that research firm Gartner Dataquest has dropped coverage of the EDA industry, and laid off reknowned analyst Gary Smith and his colleagues.

This is disturbing. I don't like changes like this! Dataquest (and Gary) have been covering the EDA industry for many years, providing analysis and prognostications, that, agree with them or not, were a starting point for debating the direction of EDA technology.

Let's hope that Gary and crew resurface to share their wisdom and opinions again. Best wishes to them.

10/25 Update: see the "backstory" and lots of comments from EDA industry personnel in John Cooley's article on Gary Smith's departure.

Over 500 Million Served

The production volumes described in NVIDIA AND TSMC CELEBRATE NEW MILESTONE:500 MILLION PROCESSORS are mind-boggling! What a profitable business model for both TSMC and NVIDIA, and what a contrast to the "old" ASIC model.

At my previous company, the lifetime projected volume of the ASIC we were designing was around 50,000 units. Yet, the ASIC vendor had to provide significant complex IP and especially engineering headcount to shepherd the chip to the prototype stage. Unfortunately, the market changed and that chip never made it to production. Sorry, ASIC vendor!

No wonder that most ASIC vendors are having a very tough life, with rising costs and declining design starts (and especially, fewer designs going to mass production). Contrast this with foundries such as TSMC, which get the customer to do all the IP integration, implementation, and verification, and the foundry can just focus on selling wafers. No wonder this model is eclipsing the ASIC model.

ICCAD Early Reg. Deadline Today

ICCAD-2006 is coming to San Jose this November 5-9 and the early registration deadline is TODAY, October 18.

Registration reveals a major benefit of IEEE or ACM membership: you get a discount of over $100 registering for the full conference!

Wondering about the IEEE

I feel like I should be a member of the IEEE. I am, this year. Throughout my career, it's been an on-again, off-again relationship. Even when my company reimburses me, sometimes I feel that it's not worth it.

What I want it to be

• Teach me about new developments in my specialty. There are some gems, but it's harder to find from IEEE publications vs. trade publications like EE Times or EDN. Part of it is because I can't find a Society/Publication that aligns well with my specialty (see Gripes, below).
• Teach me about interesting developments in other specialties. The articles need to start from a basic level, not trying to prove how sophisticated and complex the author can be. I am not finding this from the IEEE. Something like Scientific American or Discovery magazines might be a more accessible resource.
• Represent my professional interests. The IEEE-USA tries to do this, and I'm a member. But membership is optional, and I wonder how many USA EEs belong or are even familiar with it?

What IEEE should do

• Give a primer to members on how the IEEE works. I have sort of figured these things, but why doesn't the IEEE come with a "user's manual" to address these dead-on?
  • What is a Region and what's a Chapter?
  • What is the difference between their publications Spectrum, Proceedings, and Transactions?

Other gripes

• There's no Society for Digital IC (RTL & Gates) engineers! I just can't figure this one out. There are certainly Societies for semiconductor process, circuit design, and packaging. But what Society should a plain-ol' ASIC engineer belong to? Why isn't there a perfect fit for such a common EE discipline?
• The price/performance of an IEEE membership really seems out of whack. Why does it cost me (or my company) over $140/year, when the main benefit is a magazine subscription or two? Why, I can subscribe to EE Times for free and get far more practical news and technical information! Where is all the IEEE money going? To some huge bureaucracy in New Jersey?

What do you think about the IEEE? Do you belong? Why or why not?